This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
It is commonplace in arthroscopic procedures to employ sutures and anchors to secure soft tissues to bone. Various commercially available “soft” anchors include a coreless sleeve of woven (braided) polyester, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Such polyester sleeves serve as an anchor by bunching up against cortical bone when a suture threaded through the sleeve is pulled tight through a hole drilled into the bone.
While woven or braided polyester sleeves provide mechanical anchoring strength in the immediate time following surgery, they generally do not invite biological fixation to further stabilize the soft anchor inside of the bone. Woven or braided polyester sleeves do not encourage tissue infiltration and integration because, PEP, as with polymers in general, is hydrophobic, which does not enable cellular or tissue attachment. Additionally, the size of polyester filaments is much larger than the size of cells, which causes the filaments to be viewed as foreign bodies by cells and by the immune system. Accordingly, there remains a need to develop anchors that encourage cellular ingrowth and biological fixation to bone.